Category: Memes

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I meant to read in 2018 but didn’t get to

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. It’s perfect for those of us who have both a love of books and a love of lists! This week’s topic is:

Books I Meant to Read In 2018 but Didn’t Get To

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These four books were on my Autumn 2018 TBR but I didn’t have time to read them:

1. The Green Gauntlet by RF Delderfield
2. Transcription by Kate Atkinson
3. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
4. Confusion by Elizabeth Jane Howard

And here are two unread books from my Spring 2018 TBR list:

5. Munich by Robert Harris
6. Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

A book that I didn’t get to from my 2018 20 Books of Summer list:

7. The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath

And a few that I’d planned to read for last year’s R.I.P. challenge:

8. The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell
9. A Gathering of Ghosts by Karen Maitland
10. The Sussex Downs Murder by John Bude

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You can expect to see me reading some, if not all, of these books in 2019 instead.

Have you read any of them? Are there any that I really need to read as soon as possible?

Top Ten Tuesday: New-to-me authors I read in 2018

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This week’s Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) gives us a chance to look back at our 2018 reading and pick out ten authors we read for the first time last year. I have chosen to focus on authors I enjoyed and whose work I’m planning to read more of in the future.

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1. Dorothy Whipple

I had been curious about Dorothy Whipple for a long time, knowing that she is one of the most popular authors published by Persephone. After reading Someone at a Distance, I understand why and will definitely be reading more of her books.

2. Graham Swift

I hadn’t thought Graham Swift would be my sort of author, but I enjoyed his short novel Mothering Sunday enough to want to read more.

3. Monica Dickens

The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens won a place on my favourite books of 2018 list. I want to investigate her other books now, probably starting with Mariana.

4. E.M. Delafield

The Diary of a Provincial Lady proved to be a funny, witty, entertaining read – and a good place to start with E.M. Delafield. I’m hoping to meet the Provincial Lady again in 2019.

5. Tim Leach

Smile of the Wolf, a beautifully written novel set in 10th century Iceland, was my first Tim Leach book. I’m looking forward to reading his previous two, The Last King of Lydia and The King and the Slave.

6. Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor was an author I’d been meaning to try for years and I finally got round to reading A Game of Hide and Seek in 2018. I’m sure I’ll be reading more of her books soon.

7. Pat Barker

I didn’t love The Silence of the Girls as much as I’d hoped to, but I was pleased to have the opportunity to try a Pat Barker book at last.

8. Kate O’Brien

That Lady, a historical novel set in 16th century Spain, was chosen for me by one of last year’s Classics Club Spins. Kate O’Brien’s other books sound very different, but I’m interested in trying another one.

9. Elizabeth Jenkins

Harriet was a dark and disturbing novel but I loved it. Now I want to read The Tortoise and the Hare, which seems to be the only other Elizabeth Jenkins book still in print.

10. Richard Hull

The Murder of My Aunt was another of my books of the year from 2018. I have recently received a review copy of one of his other crime novels, And Death Came Too, so I’m hoping that will be another good one.

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Have you read anything by any of these authors? Which new-to-you authors did you discover in 2018?

Six Degrees of Separation: From The French Lieutenant’s Woman to Death in Cyprus

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It’s the first Saturday of the month (and of the year!) which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

The book we are starting with this month is The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, a book I read a few years ago and didn’t enjoy as much as I had thought I would. Published in 1969 but set in 1867, the style is an unusual blend of the Victorian and the modern, which didn’t quite work for me.

When I have read the first book in the chain, it usually makes it easier to get started, but not this time! I included The French Lieutenant’s Woman in a previous chain a few months ago where I linked it from another metafiction novel and to another book set in Lyme Regis. As I didn’t want to use the same links again, I had to think of something different and all I’ve been able to come up with is books with ‘French’ in the title. This leads me to Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier.

The Frenchman of the title is the pirate Jean-Benoit Aubéry. A novel I read last year which also involves pirates (although these pirates are not as charming as Jean-Benoit) is The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson. Set in the 17th century, the novel tells the story of a group of people abducted during a Barbary pirate raid on Iceland and taken in captivity to Algeria.

Iceland and Algeria are both fascinating countries to read about and I enjoyed the contrast between both settings in The Sealwoman’s Gift. I’ve read a few other books set in Iceland and the one I’m going to link to here is Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, a beautifully written novel about an Icelandic woman, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, who is found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.

Thinking about Burial Rites reminds me of Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. Alias Grace is set in Canada, not Iceland, but otherwise the two books have a lot in common. They both give fictional accounts of real women who were convicted of murder (Grace Marks, in the case of Atwood’s novel).

I have read a few of Atwood’s other books, most recently Hag-Seed, which is a clever re-telling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Also inspired, at least in a small part, by The Tempest is This Rough Magic, one of my favourite books by Mary Stewart. The title comes from a line spoken by Prospero in the play (“this rough magic I here abjure”).

Mary Stewart’s books (apart from her Arthurian series) are a combination of suspense, romance and mystery and feature young heroines in exotic or atmospheric settings. M.M. Kaye’s Death In… novels from the same era remind me of Stewart’s in many ways, although I find them slightly darker. I have read three, including Death in Cyprus, and still have the rest to look forward to.

And that’s my chain for this month…Frenchmen, pirates, Iceland, female prisoners, The Tempest and romantic suspense!

In February, we will be starting with Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk.

Six Degrees of Separation: The Christmas Edition

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It’s the first Saturday of a new month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

The book we’re going to begin with this month is, appropriately for December, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I still have the beautiful hardback copy I was given as a child with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. I talked about my memories of A Christmas Carol in a Classics Club monthly meme from a few years ao.

There were many different directions I could have taken from this starting point, but I decided to get into the festive spirit with a chain made entirely of Christmas-themed books. Shortly after I first started blogging in 2009, I took part in a Christmas reading challenge for which I read two books: the one above and The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder.

This is an unusual novel (like most of Gaarder’s), in which the story of an ancient pilgrimage to Bethlehem unfolds through scraps of paper found behind the doors of an Advent calendar. In the present day, meanwhile, a mystery begins to emerge involving the creation of the calendar itself.

Now, from one Christmas mystery to a whole collection of them…

Murder Under the Christmas Tree contains stories by classic crime authors such as Margery Allingham, Dorothy L Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle. One author whose work doesn’t appear in that collection is Agatha Christie, but she did write a few books with a Christmas theme…including the next book in my chain, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas.

The book involves the murder of an old man who is found dead in his home while his family gather to celebrate Christmas. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a favourite Christie and I didn’t find it very Christmassy either. Another book with a very similar plot, published three years later, is Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer.

Envious Casca has also been published under the title A Christmas Party. However, the family featured in the novel were such a nasty, unpleasant group of people, I couldn’t think of anything worse than being a guest at that particular party! Another mystery set at Christmas with a dysfunctional family at its heart is I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, the fourth in Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series.

In I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, eleven-year-old Flavia tries to catch Santa Claus on his way down the chimney. In the final book in my chain, Nora Bonesteel’s Christmas Past by Sharyn McCrumb, Sheriff Spencer Arrowood is also trying to catch a man on Christmas Eve – a criminal who lives on a remote farm in the Appalachian Mountains.

For the first time since I’ve started taking part in Six Degrees of Separation, I am able to bring the chain full circle. The title of my final book contains the words ‘Christmas Past’ – and the first book features the Ghost of Christmas Past!

Have you read any of these? What are your favourite Christmas-themed books?

Next month (January) we will be starting our chains with The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles.

Top Ten Tuesday: Friends and family

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The topic for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl is:

Platonic Relationships In Books (friendships, parent/child, siblings, family, etc.)

Romantic relationships in books usually get most of the attention, but often the relationships I find the strongest or the most moving are the ones between family and friends. Here are ten of my favourites. I could have included many more!

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1. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March (Little Women by Louisa May Alcott)

I wanted to start my list with some fictional sisters and naturally the March girls were the first to come to mind! Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy don’t always get along, but as sisters there’s an unbreakable bond between them. I think part of the appeal is that the four all have such different personalities, so most readers will be able to identify with at least one of them.

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2. D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis (The Three Musketeers and sequels by Alexandre Dumas)

All for one and one for all! I had to include this classic tale of friendship on my list. Like the sisters in Little Women, d’Artagnan and his three friends each have very different character traits, which means that most readers will be able to pick a favourite. In the later books in the series, the four of them are leading separate lives of their own, only interacting occasionally, but it’s the relationship between them that makes the first book such a joy to read.

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3. Francis and Richard Crawford (The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett)

This wonderful series contains lots of relationships, platonic and otherwise, which are developed over the course of the six novels, but one I find particularly interesting is the one between our hero, Francis Crawford of Lymond, and his brother, Richard. To say that they don’t always see eye to eye would be an understatement and following the ups and downs of their relationship from The Game of Kings to Checkmate was one of my favourite aspects of the series.

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4. Claire Fraser and Jenny Murray (the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon)

As with the Lymond Chronicles above, there are many relationships in the Outlander series that I could have featured here, but I have chosen the one between Claire Fraser and her sister-in-law Jenny Murray, one of the most long-standing in the series, being formed in the first book of eight. Their relationship changes a lot throughout the series as Claire travels the world having adventures while Jenny stays at home on the family estate in Scotland; sometimes they are barely speaking, while at others they’re the best of friends.

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5. Fitz and Nighteyes (The Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies by Robin Hobb)

I’m currently in the middle of the Tawny Man trilogy, so this relationship came quickly to mind. Nighteyes is a wolf, but in Hobb’s fantasy world the bond he shares with Fitz is far stronger than the bond you would usually expect between a human and an animal. There are several occasions where Fitz owes his life to Nighteyes and vice versa.

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6. Bishop Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant (Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather)

The two central characters in Willa Cather’s 1927 novel are French missionaries who are sent into the newly formed diocese of New Mexico in the nineteenth century. They are very different men and I found the depiction of the friendship between the warm, friendly Vaillant and the quiet, reserved Latour very moving.

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7. Atticus, Jem and Scout Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)

This 1960 classic is a favourite of many people, including myself, and one of the reasons for that is surely the relationship at the heart of the novel between lawyer Atticus Finch and his children, Jem and Jean Louise (Scout). It’s a relationship based on mutual respect and understanding; Scout and Jem learn a lot of important lessons from their father, but they have a lot to offer him in return.

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8. Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin (the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian)

I’m not usually a fan of nautical fiction, but I am now six books into Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring series and looking forward to reading the seventh. I still don’t know my mainsail from my topsail, but the friendship between Royal Navy Captain Jack Aubrey and ship’s surgeon and spy Stephen Maturin is enough for me to keep reading.

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9. Arthur Bryant and John May (Bryant and May series by Christopher Fowler)

These two eighty-year-old detectives have the perfect partnership, each bringing a very different approach to crime-solving. May is practical, logical and ready to embrace modern technology, while the eccentric Bryant prefers to rely on clairvoyants, witches and his own arcane knowledge. Their differences could explain how they’ve had so much success over the years and have remained such good friends.

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10. Flavia, Ophelia and Daphne de Luce (the Flavia de Luce series by Alan Bradley)

I started my list with sisters, so will finish with sisters. The relationship between twelve-year-old Flavia and her two older sisters is one that has frustrated me since the beginning of the series. Why do they dislike each other so much? Why are Feely and Daffy so cruel to Flavia? Nine books into the series, there are finally some signs that their relationship is starting to improve, but it has taken a long time!

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Have you read any of these? What are your favourite platonic relationships in fiction?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Vanity Fair to The Red Lily Crown

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It’s the first weekend of a new month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

The first book this month is Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, for once a book that I’ve actually read! I used Vanity Fair in a previous chain a few months ago and linked it to Little Women, which has a chapter entitled “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair”. I don’t want to use the same link again, so I’ve come up with a different one this time.

Vanity Fair is a Victorian novel published in 1848, but set in the earlier Regency period. Another novel written in the Victorian era but with an earlier setting (much earlier in this case) is George Eliot’s Romola, a long and detailed story of Renaissance Italy. I found it a challenging book to read but definitely worth the effort.

My next link is easy. I love reading about Renaissance Italy and have read a lot of novels with that setting. Like Romola, Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus is set in 15th century Florence just after the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici and therefore covers some of the same historical events – although the story is very different.

The title, The Birth of Venus, is the name of a painting by Botticelli (although that’s not what the story is about). Another novel which uses the name of a famous painting as its title is Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, set in Delft in the 1660s.

Scarlett Johansson played the title character in the film version of this book with Colin Firth as the artist Vermeer. Colin Firth has also appeared in several other adaptations of books and plays, including Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in which he starred as Jack Worthing. I don’t often read plays but I loved that one so I’m going to use it as the next book in my chain.

Oscar Wilde is known for his humour and The Importance of Being Earnest has a lot of great lines. I don’t always find books funny that are supposed to be funny, but one that I do think is hilarious is Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. I sometimes find myself reaching for it to re-read favourite scenes when I need to cheer myself up.

One of those favourite scenes involves Harris getting lost in the Hampton Court Maze. I love mazes and labyrinths and I’ve actually just finished a book that would have been the perfect choice to link to next. I prefer to choose books that I’ve already reviewed here on my blog, though, so instead I am linking to The Red Lily Crown by Elizabeth Loupas, which features a labyrinth in the Boboli Gardens in Florence. Florence, of course, was also the setting for the second and third books in my chain.

And that’s it for this month! My links have included Renaissance Italy, paintings, actors, funny books and mazes. Have you read any of my choices?

Next month we will be starting with A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Top Ten Tuesday: 10 books about witches and witchcraft

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This week’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is a “Halloween/Creepy Freebie”. I seem to have read a lot of books about witches in the last few years, so I’ve chosen ten of them to list here.

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1. Corrag by Susan Fletcher

Also published as Witch Light and The Highland Witch, this is a beautiful, moving story about a young girl accused of witchcraft and the part she played in one of the most tragic moments in Scotland’s history – the Glencoe Massacre of 1692. The writing style is unusual and it took me a while to get used to it, but I’m glad I persevered because this really is a lovely book.

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2. Thornyhold by Mary Stewart

Not a scary book at all, but a gentle, comforting one. When Gilly’s cousin Geillis dies, leaving her a cottage in the countryside, Gilly finds that she has also inherited a black cat and a collection of magic spells. Could Geillis have been a witch? As with most of Stewart’s novels, there are some beautiful descriptions of nature, a likeable heroine and a touch of romance.

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3. The Witchfinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown

This novel is narrated by Alice Hopkins, a fictional sister of Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witchfinder General who was believed to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women in England during the 17th century. Alice’s story didn’t interest me much, but I found it fascinating to read about the methods Hopkins used to identify witches.

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4. The Craftsman by Sharon Bolton

Sharon Bolton’s latest novel follows an investigation into the murder of three teenagers in a small Lancashire town near Pendle Hill, a place associated with witchcraft since the Pendle Witch Trials of the 17th century. As Florence Lovelady attempts to solve the crime she discovers a coven of modern day witches operating in the town. Could they be connected with the murders?

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5. The Vanishing Witch by Karen Maitland

Set in the 1380s, this novel has everything I’ve come to expect from Karen Maitland: the dark atmosphere, the elements of the supernatural, and the twisting, turning plot. As well as hints of witchcraft, the story also features a ghost – and every chapter begins with a charm or a spell to protect oneself from witches.

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6. Circe by Madeline Miller

A mythological witch next! I loved this beautifully written novel by Madeline Miller which fleshes out the character of Circe, the witch from Homer’s Odyssey. I was surprised to see how many different Greek myths Miller incorporates into Circe’s story.

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7. Widdershins by Helen Steadman

Set in the 17th century, this novel describes the events leading up to the Newcastle Witch Trials of 1650 which resulted in the largest number of people in England’s history being executed for witchcraft in a single day. With half of the book following the witchfinder responsible for hunting down the so-called witches, and the other half following one of the accused women, we are given both sides of the story. The sequel is coming next year!

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8. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

This is the first book in the All Souls Trilogy which follows the adventures of witch Diana Bishop and vampire Matthew Clairmont. I wasn’t at all sure that this would be my sort of book, but I found that I loved the combination of romance, history, adventure and fantasy.

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9. The White Witch by Elizabeth Goudge

Set during the English Civil War, the white witch of the title is Froniga, a healer and herbalist. Like Thornyhold above, this is a gentle, beautifully written ‘witch’ story, rather than a creepy one. Although there are themes of magic, mystery and mythology, it was the details of 17th century village life and the lovely descriptions of the countryside that I enjoyed the most.

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10. The Lost Book of Salem by Katherine Howe

Also published as The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, the final novel on my list follows a 20th century history student as she attempts to track down a spell book belonging to Deliverance Dane, one of the women accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

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Have you read any of these – or any other books about witches or witchcraft?